ANSI/IEEE standard 754-1985 for binary floating-point arithmetic defines four rounding modes to affect all arithmetic operations except comparison and remainder: round to nearest, round toward negative infinity, round toward positive infinity, and round to zero.
In some processor architectures, prior to execution of an instruction to convert a floating point number to an integer using a specific rounding mode, the processing unit needs to be set to that rounding mode. This is achieved by reading and storing the current rounding mode, setting the processor architecture to the desired rounding mode, performing the conversion and setting processor architecture to the stored rounding mode. The instructions of setting the desired rounding mode and setting the stored rounding mode are examples of floating point control instructions.
Execution of a floating point control instruction may be time consuming and may degrade the processor architecture performance.
If a binary code associated with a first processor architecture having a first instruction set is to be executed by a second processor architecture having a second instruction set, a binary translation module may translate the source binary code into a target binary code associated with the second processor architecture. The results produced by executing the target binary code on a processor that complies with the target architecture are substantially the same as those produced by executing the source binary code on a processor that complies with the source architecture.
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements shown in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements may be exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity.